At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

April 27, 2017

The Adventures of John Blake:
Mystery of the Ghost Ship. By Philip Pullman. Illustrated by Fred Fordham.
Graphix/Scholastic. $19.99.

Philip Pullman does nothing
straightforwardly. Whether reinterpreting the Miltonic universe in his
best-known work, the His Dark Materials
trilogy, or working with John Aggs on a comic strip for The DFC (David Fickling Comics) – or reconsidering traditional
fantasy/adventure and fairy-tale tropes in Clockwork,
The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, Mossycoat, I Was a Rat! and elsewhere –
Pullman brings along a unique sensibility, a willingness to stretch forms and
topics, a desire to communicate well beyond any strictures of age, and an
interest both in the outré and in the everyday, humdrum world (which is never quite humdrum in Pullman’s hands).It is tempting to think of Pullman as trying
to pull man (and woman, and child) in some entirely new directions, just as
P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins was someone who popped in now and then with a bit of
magic and the occasional dose of harsh reality. The fact that Poppins is
fiction and Pullman reality is at most an accident of birth.

And now Pullman has turned
his attention to the graphic novel, taking that comic strip he created for The DFC and taffy-pulling (or
taffy-pull-man-ing) it into a work of mystery, adventure, fantasy, science,
science fiction, time warps, geography, nautical travel – a massive potential
mishmash that, in actuality, is so exciting and variegated that even its most
absurd elements become ones in which readers will want to believe, or will fear they have no choice but to believe.

It is the simple (no, not
simple at all) story of a young girl named Serena who is knocked overboard from
a small boat during a storm and rescued by a young boy named John Blake, whose
ship is lost, not at sea, but in time – crewed by people from various time
periods (from ancient Rome to the modern day) and trying to get back where various
people belong. The drifting-in-time theme connects to a story of an Einsteinian
experiment gone wrong, which connects to the tale of an always-connected
cotemporary device called an apparator, which connects to a story of murder and
industrial theft, which connects to a story of overweening corporate ambition
and greed, which connects to a story of obsession not only of the evil
corporate mogul but also of a determined young woman who is tracking the
ship-out-of-time and therefore finds herself in danger.

The story threads, so
elaborate and so beautifully interconnected, bespeak Pullman’s style. But this
is a graphic novel, and it can succeed only to the extent that the
illustrations complement and enhance the story. Fred Fordham’s do that and more
than that: they tell the story, often
through wordless panels whose subtle colors do an excellent job of reflecting
the various characters and events. The critical set-in-motion event in which
John Ford is set adrift in time is presented as a two-page spread, almost
entirely white, with an alarmed-looking boy either drifting into clouds or
becoming cloudlike himself as he recedes toward the background. Other pages are
done in hues that reflect the story’s time periods and events, from sepia tone
for older scenes to dark reds and browns in a corporate environment to dark,
dark grey and brown with occasional touches of red in a climactic fight scene –
and much more. Fordham is especially adept with eyes: the characters’ expressions
and attitudes, their truthfulness or prevarication, their sensibility or
madness, are reflected in their eyes to an extraordinary degree. Pullman
manages, and Fordham illustrates, a massive climax that knits together multiple
threads of the story, but leaves open plenty of possibilities for one or more
sequels to this engrossing book – perhaps focused on John Blake’s ship, the Mary Alice, itself. Or is it herself? That is one question left
tantalizingly unanswered here. But the book’s title is, after all, The Adventures of John Blake. That is
“adventures,” plural, and implies that Mystery
of the Ghost Ship is but one of a series of voyages. We can only hope.

Sometimes the contrast
between the formula used in adventure series for preteens and those for
teenagers is especially stark. Jonathan Bernstein’s Bridget Wilder trilogy is clearly for the 8-12 age group, focusing
on middle-school angst, the contrast between a seemingly ordinary girl and her
actual exciting non-school life, and a whole series of rather trumped-up family
issues. There is also a lot of humor in this series, although the funny and
exciting parts never quite meld – it is as if Bridget is two separate
characters rather than a single one with multiple facets. Actually “facets” is
not quite the right word, implying a polished gem and a wide variety of angles
– Bridget is at best semi-polished and semi-precious, and the entirety of her
characterization consists of her being an average everyday middle-schooler (to
whom the intended preteen-girl audience can therefore relate) and at the same
time a wonder-working, heroic, behind-the-scenes (and eventually in-front-of-the-scenes)
super spy (the fantasy of which is something else to which targeted readers can
relate). The first book of the series, Spy-in-Training,
had Bridget become a spy at the behest of her birth father, whom she had never
known or even seen in a photo (an over-convenient plot twist there). Eventually
it turned out that her recruitment into a super-secret spy agency was nothing
but an evil ploy to get at her dad; so by the start of Spy to the Rescue, the second book (originally published last year
and now available in paperback), Bridget has been forced to become just a
normal middle-school student of average abilities and with the usual
friendship-and-family issues. Since that scenario would make for a very boring
book, Bernstein does not let it last long. Soon Bridget is getting framed by
someone at school for a series of petty misdeeds, such as stealing cheerleader
secrets; and then her super-spy father goes missing, so Bridget obviously has
to take on the world (or at least the bad guys in it) to rescue him. Having the
book start with Bridget being kidnapped by evil cheerleaders is a pretty neat
touch, but other elements of Spy to the
Rescue are just too formula-driven to keep readers interested unless they
have low expectations. Exploding toilets; magnetic chewing gum; an annoying
older brother named Ryan, who is Bridget’s chaperone on a trip to New York and
who brings along his drip of a girlfriend, Abby; said brother’s unexpected
protective streak when Bridget needs protecting. OK, got it all. And then there
is some supposedly straight talk to Bridget, when she is told, “You think you can be a spy when it suits you and then go back to
your normal life. But you can't…. You have to commit or walk away, Bridget. You
can't just show up for a weekend and then go back to school like nothing
happened.” Uh-huh.

So,
anyway, then we get to the series finale, Live
Free, Spy Hard, where those words of warning have evaporated into thin air.
This time, Bridget’s dad, Carter Strike, like, totally upsets Bridget by assigning someone else to protect
Bridget’s favorite boy band on a world tour. And then the president’s daughter
is kidnapped (oh, that’s original)
during the presidential campaign, forcing Bridget to go undercover to get the
drop on a plot to take over the United States through the use of evilly
programmed “Font phones.” This eventually leads to the sort of pronouncement
inevitably made by defeated adult super-villains who get their comeuppance
because of the pluck and integrity of average preteen girls: “I’ve still got
more money than anyone else. I can still remake the world the way I want it.”
But no! No while Bridget is in the spy game – whether or not she is fully
committed to it! On the other hand, there is
that little bit about Bridget’s mom, who is about as dim as parents usually are
in books like this, discovering that Bridget has been lying about her extracurricular activities and has actually been
engaging in spy stuff instead of, you
know, regular extracurricular stuff. Bernstein can’t seem to let go of this
series: the third book ends with a chapter called “The Fall,” and then again
with a chapter called “Aftermath,” and then yet again with one called “Mommy
and Me,” and then with “The Final
Chapter,” which ends with the presumed start of yet another adventure, whether
Bernstein intends to chronicle it or not. This just-can’t-end-it conclusion
seems to indicate that Bernstein genuinely likes Bridget, and certainly he has
gone out of his way to make her likable from readers’ perspective. The
near-constant touches of sometimes-goofy humor and the determinedly superficial
nature of Bridget’s relationships with pretty much everyone scarcely give her
any realism as a character – but as in many other spy books and many, many other books for preteens, reality
is seen mostly as a barrier to enjoyment.

Not
that there is necessarily anything real-seeming about books for older, teenage readers.
There is, however, determined grittiness and an attempt to pretend that events
are genuinely important and deeply meaningful in books such as Umberland, a sequel to the singularly
charmless Everland, which took Peter Pan into steampunk territory in a
way that stripped it of every bit of its warmth and made it unengaging to the
point of ugliness. Having dumped Peter
Pan into a dark and dismal Neverland, Wendy Spinale now takes on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and gives them
similar treatment. If Bernstein seems genuinely to like his central character
in the Bridget Wilder series, Spinale
seems genuinely to dislike pretty much everyone and everything in Everland and Umberland, and does not seem to care much for the classic models
that she twists and distorts, either. Umberland
is sort of a sequel, but its connections to the previous book are rather
thin. In a way this is just as well, because it means that Umberland pretty much stands on its own after the first few
chapters, which tie into Everland
because it turns out that the supposed cure for the virus that figured largely
in Everland was not a cure at all,
but has turned into something worse – something that can only be defeated (or
defused) through the use of a poisonous apple that, however, appears to be
extinct. Unless it isn’t. And if it
isn’t, then it is in the middle of a very dangerous labyrinth, into which
someone must venture to try to find what may or may not be at the center. So
much for the tying-together of the two books. It turns out that the person who
must undertake the quest is Duchess Alyssa, who will be helped by Maddox
Hatter. Yes, here we have Spinale’s version of Alice and the Mad Hatter (Maddox
is described as “the host of the grand Poison Garden Tea Party”), and that is
about the extent to which Umberland
pays tribute to anything by Lewis Carroll. Peter, from the first book, does
continue to be a character here, but is even more annoying than in Everland and seems less realistically
motivated – while, somewhat surprisingly, Alyssa and Maddox actually make sense
as characters, and their actions tend to flow fairly reasonably from their
personalities. This puts them in stark contrast to Peter, whose impetuosity and
lack of concern for consequences, although not totally out of keeping with the
Peter Pan model, are so extreme that they become a distraction. Somehow Spinale
thinks a perpetually angry, pushy, clingy Peter is a worthy and positive character
– an odd viewpoint, to put it mildly, even though it is not surprising that a
book intended for teenagers would have at least one constantly bitter character
in it. Spinale is determined to do not only steampunk but also
almost-horror, as in a scene in which Alyssa is trapped beneath a dangerous
gryphon that she has killed, while a character who calls himself the Colonel
kills a whole group of the creatures, so that “the ground is littered with dead
gryphons, their blood staining the earth.” Spinale again uses the Everland structure of having different
characters narrate different chapters, but as in the earlier book, this is a
narrative device only, not a way of deepening characters or giving additional
insight into their feelings or motivations. Umberland
is a marginally better-told tale than Everland,
which was a (++) book; the sequel ekes out a (+++) rating. But teenagers with
any slight familiarity with Carroll’s books – even to the point of wanting to
make fun of them as “for little kids,” which they are not – may still be
disappointed to find that Spinale treats her classic models here with nearly as
much contempt as she heaped on J.M. Barrie’s work in the first book of this
sequence.

The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway,
Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War. By James McGrath Morris.
Da Capo. $27.

Ernest Hemingway has been
gone since 1961, John Dos Passos since 1970. They are survived by their
writings and their differing influence – and, it seems, by unending examples of
literary criticism, biographical information, historical tidbits and the like.
Hence, for those who are enamored of literary biographies, James McGrath
Morris’ The Ambulance Drivers. Friends
for 20 years before Hemingway precipitated one of his many infamous breakups
with supporters – readers unfamiliar with those are decidedly not the audience for this book –
Hemingway and Dos Passos were both ambulance drivers late in World War I. Hence
the book’s title. Their reactions to the war, and their strongly contrasting
personalities and outlooks, encapsulate their differences so starkly that the
fact of their having any friendship at all is surprising: Hemingway is
well-known for his love of danger and heroism and old-fashioned manliness and
bloodshed, while Dos Passos was sickened by the destructiveness of war and
became an ardent left-winger determined to change the world for the better
through his writing. Meeting briefly in World War I and parting acrimoniously
during the Spanish Civil War, whose opposing sides they viewed very
differently, the two writers were between those two wars united mostly as
voices of the so-called “lost generation” that found Paris in the 1920s far
more congenial and meaningful than anywhere in the United States.

Hemingway is today far
better known than Dos Passos, and remains a far more interesting character in
this book even though Morris sheds no new light on his personality. His Paris
years, his fame because of The Sun Also Rises, his belligerence and
downright meanness, his many betrayals, his life in Key West (to which he moved
on the recommendation of Dos Passos), his time in Havana, and his suicide are
all here. But anyone sufficiently interested in Hemingway to want to read yet
another book about his comings and goings will know all this already.

Even the ambulance driving
was scarcely a big connection for Hemingway and Dos Passos: many literary and
artistic figures of the post-World-War-I era had volunteered to drive
ambulances during the war, including e.e. cummings, Walt Disney, and Ray Kroc
of later McDonald’s fame; and W. Somerset Maugham, trained as a doctor, was
even more intimately involved with the horrors of the war. Interestingly, the
reason neither Hemingway nor Dos Passos served directly in combat was that both
failed vision tests. Also interestingly, Hemingway’s revenge on Dos Passos for
slights real or imagined did not emerge until three years after Hemingway
killed himself: in the posthumous A
Moveable Feast, he depicts Dos Passos as a parasite, sponging off rich
friends.

And what of Dos Passos? The
most revelatory information here comes from the selections from his writing:
Morris presents works that both writers produced at significant points in their
lives and strives to show why they chose specific subject matter and handled it
in specific ways. The result is a book of both literary criticism and biography
– and a definite slog for anyone who is not devoted to one or the other of these
writers and is not a specialized literary scholar focused on 20th-century
material. The elements of the book that may reach a wider audience are,
interestingly, ones that appear almost nowhere in the works of either Hemingway
or Dos Passos. They are bits of humor, often crude humor: Hemingway
accidentally shooting himself in both legs while trying to haul a shark onto a
fishing boat, and Dos Passos leaping onto the wall of a bullring in fear of the
enraged and doomed animal (Dos Passos actually went to a bullfight four years
before Hemingway ever did). But there is little enough humor in anything either
man wrote for public consumption – one reason neither writer is to everyone’s
taste today, if either of them ever was in the past.

This is a well-written book
for specialists and enthusiasts, a cleverly structured attempt to pull
biography and literary criticism together, an attempt to re-create the passion
and verve of 1920s Paris as seen through the eyes of American expatriates of
nearly a century ago. It is scarcely a book for a mass audience – not even
Hemingway’s works qualify as mass reading anymore (except under compulsion in teaching
environments), and Dos Passos’ once-admired U.S.A.
trilogy (The 42nd Parallel,
1919, and The Big Money) scarcely
generates a flicker of interest or familiarity in most quarters nowadays. The
people who bemoan that reality, especially those who bemoan it loudly and
proclaim the deterioration of taste regarding all that is good and important and
meaningful in American literature, are the audience for The Ambulance Drivers. The vast majority of Americans today would
be more interested if the book’s title had referred to Walt Disney and Ray
Kroc.

Years before he felt self-confident enough to
write a full-fledged symphony, Brahms indulged in some interesting orchestra
experiments in his two Serenades. The
first is longer and genuinely symphonic in many ways – not structurally or
thematically, but in the contrast among the movements and the comparative
sure-handedness of the handling of orchestral sections. The second is more
chamber-music-like and cleverer in design, eliminating violins altogether so as
to give the music as a whole an unusually mellow tone and change the character
of the entire work in a way that would lead to so much later Brahms being
described as “autumnal.” Yet there remains a youthfulness and brightness to
this second serenade that, if less overt than in the first, provides a very
pleasant contrast with the darkening of the instrumentation. Jaime Martín and
the Gävle Symphony Orchestra do a particularly good job of contrasting the
sound worlds of the two works on a new Ondine CD. The first serenade is bright
and upbeat throughout, its admittedly somewhat trivial themes handled with
lightness above a level of rhythmic solidity that turns the work into a worthy
“developmental” piece on Brahms’ journey toward full symphonic form – in this
way somewhat paralleling Mendelssohn’s early string symphonies as predecessors
of his five numbered ones. The second serenade has a greater chamber-music
feeling than usual here, perhaps because the Gävle Symphony Orchestra has only
52 members – reduced significantly in this case by the absence of violins.
Certainly there is warmth to the performance, but it is offered in the context
of this work’s stylistic homage to the past: the counterpoint and Bach-like
elements here were not to recur to this extent in Brahms’ symphonies until the
fourth and last. The scale of this serenade is that of a Haydn symphony rather
than that of one from the Romantic era, with the darker sound palette mixing
intriguingly with the comparatively small orchestra. These are very fine
performances in themselves – and are illuminating in the way they can help
listeners look ahead to the symphonies that Brahms was to compose in later
years.

Although Ives, like Brahms, wrote four
symphonies, Ives’ symphonic notions were well beyond those of Brahms and,
indeed, on a different branch of the symphonic family tree – or at least an
offshoot of the main trunk. Even works that might be looked at as studies for
Ives’ symphonies are quite different from the two Brahms serenades. An
excellent new Chandos SACD featuring Ives’ Third and Fourth and the Orchestral Set No. 2 shows Ives’ unique
compositional thinking exceptionally well. Ives often aimed for broad, slow
tempos that made his music hymnlike even when it did not include actual
snatches of hymn tunes – although those did appear frequently, either as the
emotional heart of movements (or sections of movements) or in contrast to the
dissonance and multitonality with which Ives juxtaposed them. Orchestral Set No. 2 starts “very
slowly” with a movement called “An Elegy to Our Forefathers,” continues into a
second movement marked “slower” two times and “gradually slower” at the end,
and concludes with a fascinating movement that also starts “very slowly” and
reproduces musically (and with chorus) the reaction of people to the sinking of
the Lusitania in 1915. The Melbourne
Symphony Orchestra under Sir Andrew Davis plays the work broadly and with
fervor – and Davis finds a sense of overall unity in music that can easily come
across as three disparate pieces that just happen to be played one after the
other. Davis brings a similar sensibility to Symphony No. 3, “The Camp
Meeting,” a small-orchestra work intended to showcase open-air Presbyterian
religious services of Ives’ time. The three movements are all balanced
temporally – that is, all are nearly the same length – and are also
structurally balanced in ways that Orchestral
Set No. 2 is not. The first is a “gathering” movement, the second a kind of
scherzo called “Children’s Day,” and the largo
finale is a broad work of very traditional religious sentiment called
“Communion” and being suitably sober and warmly heartfelt. Yet the highlight of
this recording is neither in Orchestral
Set No. 2 nor in the Third Symphony, but in the Fourth. This is a
notoriously difficult work to perform, to understand and to listen to – it
traditionally requires two or even three conductors to handle the simultaneous
multiple time signatures, overlapping tempos and extremely complex instrumental
entries and exits (Davis is here assisted by Anthony Pasquill). Yet the work
has, as its heart, a straightforward philosophical program, a question about
life presented in the first movement with the poem “Watchman, Tell Us of the Night”
and answered in various ways in the three other movements. None of the answers
is completely satisfactory, with the result that the symphony’s overall meaning
is along the same lines as that of The
Unanswered Question, albeit in far grander and more-complex form. The
challenge for a conductor here – one to which Davis responds with great skill –
is to take the tremendous instrumental complexity in parts of the symphony,
contrast it effectively with the deliberate simplicity of other parts, and make
the entirety into a satisfying religious/philosophical journey for an audience
that cannot be expected to understand or care about the very high level of
difficulty involved in presenting the quest. Davis quite clearly understands
this: the symphony must transcend the difficulties inherent in its performance,
drawing attention to its underlying premises rather than to the means by which
those premises are explored. The orchestra plays here with exceptional clarity:
even the cacophonies are clear. And Davis manages to keep the work as a whole
from sounding episodic (even in the second movement, which features more than
30 tempo changes). The symphony hangs together and provides an experience that
is highly satisfying both intellectually and emotionally, even if its central
questions about the meaning of existence remain, inevitably, unanswered.

If Brahms was studying ways to write a
symphony in a post-Beethoven world, and if Ives was in effect studying ways to
expand the notion of a symphony into new and far more complex and meaningful
directions, then Dvořák’s symphonic “studies” must be deemed far more modest. The
main thing that Dvořák was seeking was his own symphonic voice – one reflective
of his Czech roots but still in line with his essentially Brahmsian outlook on
music. Dvořák’s struggles in this regard are apparent in his first five
symphonies, but in his Sixth he at last succeeds in forging something genuinely
personal and new. This happens, ironically, when he tracks Brahms most closely:
this symphony is in the same key as Brahms’ Second (D major), and the finale
opens with a theme so close to that of Brahms that listeners may be forgiven
for wondering, for a moment, whose music they are listening to. But the overall
shape of the symphony, its thematic choices, the handling of the broad first
movement and the third-movement Furiant
– these and other elements give this symphony a personal stamp beyond the
melodiousness and lyrical beauty that Dvořák already offered in his earlier
symphonies. A newly released performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra
under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, on the orchestra’s own label, shows a young
conductor also feeling his own way in
this music. This release features live recordings, and certainly Nézet-Séguin
knows how to play to an audience: there is palpable excitement in this Sixth,
with enough joy and drama in the finale so the enthusiastic post-performance
reaction of the audience is wholly understandable. But Nézet-Séguin falls into
a trap several times in this symphony, most notably in the first movement, by
using the work’s expansive themes as excuses for unwarranted rubato that significantly slows the
forward momentum of the material – momentum that, ironically, Dvořák here
figured out, for the first time, how to sustain successfully. Recorded in 2016,
this Sixth, although it has many elegant instrumental touches and is very well
played, is less successful than the Seventh, recorded in 2009. There is
occasional unneeded and harmful rubato
here as well, but much less, and this grand minor-key symphony (D minor) swells
and flows with greater inevitability of form and structure than does the Sixth.
This is a deeply meaningful work, the composer’s most profound symphony, and
remains somewhat underplayed perhaps for that reason: its feelings seem
stronger than those to which listeners are accustomed in Dvořák’s other
symphonic works. Nézet-Séguin carries the music forward effectively, eventually
building to a dramatic finale that, unfortunately, misfires at the very end,
with a speeding up that robs it of impact and then a slowing down that brings
it to a screeching halt. Nézet-Séguin certainly knows how to handle an
orchestra, but this (+++) recording indicates that he still has some studying
of Dvořák to do in order to handle the symphonies as well as he does the Othello overture (another live recording
from 2016). Here the taut drama comes through with effective intensity – it
would be interesting to hear Nézet-Séguin’s handling of the three tone poems Nature, Life and Love, in which Othello is the third. Certainly
Nézet-Séguin is a conductor to watch, and to listen to, in this repertoire, as
he becomes more thoroughly familiar with and comfortable in it.

There are ways to package an
excellent general-interest recording to turn it into an excellent
limited-interest one. That is what BIS has done with a Blu-ray release called Gloria in Excelsis Deo. The centerpiece
and the glory of this release is its offering of the last three Bach cantatas to
be recorded by Bach Collegium Japan under the direction of Masaaki Suzuki. They
are Gloria in excelsis deo, BWV 191; Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele, BWV 69; and
Freue dich, erlöste Schar, BWV 30.
All three get poised, beautifully balanced readings, with considerable
attention to detail. In Part I of BWV 30, the brilliant bass aria and alto aria
on the same basic motive are highlights, with bass Peter Kooij and countertenor
Robin Blaze quite impressive (as are soprano Hana Blažíková and tenor
Gerd Türk in their appearances).
A highlight of BWV 69 is the expressive tenor recitative, with its unexpected
dissonant and chromatic passage in the middle. And in BWV 191, Bach’s only
cantata to a Latin text, the work’s overall festivity is thoroughly winning.
Any listener interested in Bach’s cantatas will find these readings more than
worthwhile – but they are not the reason-for-being of the release. Instead,
this is a documentary, made in 2013, that marks the completion of the performers’
18-year musical odyssey through all the Bach cantatas, with interviews with
Suzuki and various singers, plus behind-the-scenes footage, intended as primary
attractions. They will be – but only for a rarefied audience whose interests
are as much in these specific performers and this specific cycle as in Bach’s
actual music. The result is a nicely presented visual production in which the
cantatas, although important, are not the sole point and in some ways not even
the most-central one. The recording is for fans of the performers and for
people interested in and impressed by the major undertaking of recording all
Bach’s cantatas. This is a release about a journey through time, not so much
one of a journey through music, and certainly not one focused on the spiritual
journey through which Bach’s music has taken listeners for three centuries.

A group-performance-centered
classical-music release is somewhat rarer than one focused on an individual
performer and aimed at that person’s fans. The single-performer focus is
especially common when it comes to singers, and is designed to give fans a
heaping helping of one particular artist’s approach to material of greater or
lesser familiarity. The new Naxos CD featuring soprano Krassimira Stoyanova
would be a straightforward case in point were it not for the repertoire. Yes,
everything here is by Puccini, and that is scarcely a surprise – but all 19
tracks on the CD are Puccini songs,
which are very infrequently performed and which it is fair to say that most
listeners will find unfamiliar. Whether they will find them congenial is
another matter: the songs are more conventional and less emotive than the
Puccini arias to which listeners generally come, and while there are a couple
of fascinating items here – especially two songs in Latin for soprano and
mezzo-soprano, with Stoyanova singing both parts through the miracle of
engineering and the flexibility of her voice – for the most part the songs are
rather ordinary. Accompaniments are straightforward and, by and large, so are
the comparatively restrained emotions expressed in these short works. The
topics are typical for Puccini’s time, especially for his early career, when
many of these pieces were written: they include life and death, love and faith,
nature and home. Stoyanova seems comfortable with the songs’ simplicity, and in
her mid-50s (she was born in 1962) also appears content with the somewhat
limited vocal range required by most of the works. Pianist Maria Prinz provides
fine backup, but there is not all that much for her to do: the piano parts are
generally even more straightforward than the lyrics. Fans of Stoyanova are
clearly the target audience for hearing this unusual but rather formulaic music
– the fact that the CD lasts just over 46 minutes makes it even more of a
for-fans-only offering.

Stoyanova’s fans will get
more music (70 minutes), albeit at a significantly higher price, and will find a
great deal more emotional expressiveness on another new CD, this one from BR
Klassik and titled Verismo.
Stoyanova, who is especially well-known for her work in La Juive, is in her element here in 15 tracks – the longest of
which, and one of the most impressive, is a real rarity: the death-scene aria
of the protagonist of Mascagni’s Lodoletta,
in which Stoyanova works effectively with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester under Pavel Baleff to extract every
possible bit of wrenching emotion from the highly melodramatic material. One
other Mascagni track, from L’amico Fritz,
is fine but does not hold a candle to the extended scene. Much of this CD is
devoted to Puccini – the familiar, deeply emotional, lyrical and even overdone
Puccini, not the one heard in his songs. Manon
Lescaut (twice), Turandot (also
twice), Madama Butterfly (again,
twice), Suor Angelica, Edgar and Tosca are all here – it seems inevitable
that the CD will end, after the Lodoletta
scene, with Vissi d’arte, and it
does. Also on display here are two arias from Cilea’s Andrea Lecouvreur, one from Catalani’s La Wally, and one from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier – none of them the
slightest bit surprising in an extended recital by a soprano, and all sung with
skill, a resonant vocal tone, and a fine sense of nuance. These excerpts
require more of a voice than do the Puccini songs, and Stoyanova has what they
need: her middle range is deep and sonorous, her attacks on high notes are elegantly
handled, and her overall vocal sound is pleasingly resonant. She is well
accompanied throughout the disc, and her fans will surely enjoy hearing how she
handles so many examples of operatic hyper-emotion. Even those who do not yet
know Stoyanova’s considerable abilities may enjoy hearing her perform this
material – but the disc does give a rather one-sided view of her singing, and
therefore remains more likely to be a “fan” recording than a really good
introduction to a first-rate soprano voice. In truth, not everything here is verismo in the traditional sense, but
the level of emotional expression is such that the CD’s title is understandable
– and the material downplays Stoyanova’s abilities in other types of opera,
notably bel canto. For listeners who
know her other work, though, this focus on a particular form of scene-setting
will be quite enjoyable.

April 20, 2017

One of the cleverest, oddest
and most successfully offbeat picture books of recent times, Drew Daywalt’s The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors is a
near-perfect melding of utter absurdity with storytelling panache and
absolutely superlative Adam Rex illustrations. It has such a mundane thing at
its foundation – and that is what makes it so fabulous. It is a super-heroic
telling of the entirely fictional and utterly hilarious “origin” of the
rock-paper-scissors game that kids (and some adults) love to play: rock crushes
scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper wraps rock, and so on and so forth. What
Daywalt and Rex do so brilliantly here is turn this silly, simple game into a
ridiculously overblown story of legendary heroes – a melodramatic-but-mundane
masterpiece of overstatement and over-earnestness. It starts in “the Kingdom
ofBackyard,” where scowling hero Rock
(in the utterly ordinary setting of a lawn, with a garden hose behind him) sets
off for “the mysterious Forest of Overby the Tire Swing” in search of a challenge to his prowess. And he
encounters “a warrior who hung on a rope, holding a giant’s underwear” – that
is, a clothespin. And Rock challenges the “ridiculous wooden clip-man” to
battle, and the clothespin promises to “pinch you and make you cry,” and the
exaggerated angles used to display the scenes are right out of the basic
playbook of movie and TV directors seeking to build up the size and importance
of their characters. The words “Rock versus Clothespin!” are so huge that they
barely fit on one page, and “Rock Is Victorious!” covers half of the next one
as Rock smashes the clothespin into pieces. But Rock, “still unsatisfied,”
continues his quest, and soon ridiculously accepts the challenge of “an odd and
delicious fruit” – an apricot – after Rock says it looks “like a fuzzy little
butt” and it promises to defeat Rock with its “tart and tangy sweetness.” One
smooshed apricot later and the quest continues – and we cut, in perfect
cinematic style, to another quest,
this one from “the Empire of Mom’s Home Office,” where Paper, “the smartest
warrior in all the land,” also seeks his equal. Threatened by a computer
printer, he causes a paper jam in the “giant box-monster,” and he too
progresses against other astonishing foes, including the absolutely hilarious
“half-eaten bag of trail mix.” And then there is the third quest, from “the Kitchen Realm, in the tiny village of Junk
Drawer,” from which Scissors emerges to do battle with a “tacky and vaguely
round monstrosity” with “adhesive and tangling powers.” Scissors defeats the
roll of tape and, soon afterwards, encounters and conquers the “dinosaur-shaped
chicken nuggets” from “the frigid wastes of Refrigerator/Freezer.” The three
quests eventually bring the three battle-hardened heroes together, and each
defeats each in the time-honored way of the kids’ game – and each is happy to be defeated, for all have
sought only to meet their match, which they finally do. And thus begins a
friendship for the ages, memorialized in the game that children (and some
adults) still enjoy playing today – and anyone who does not enjoy this fabulously fabricated “origin” story deserves to be
pummeled by Rock, tightly wrapped by Paper, and cut up by Scissors, all at the
same time.

Jonathan Fenske’s Plankton Is Pushy is not at this level –
very, very few kids’ books are – but it is hilarious in its own way, which is
very much the way of Fenske’s previous book, Barnacle Is Bored. There is something particularly engrossing and
intriguing in Fenske’s super-simple drawings and super-brief narratives with an
edge to them. Plankton Is Pushy
starts with pink, sort-of-shrimplike Plankton swimming along (in a scene in
which Barnacle makes a cameo appearance) and encountering large, squat,
huge-eyed, scowling Mister Mussel. Plankton likes to greet everyone he sees,
and expects a greeting in return – sort of like Br’er Rabbit, whose
pleasantries ended with him stuck fast to the tar baby. But that’s another
story – although possibly a precursor of and influence on this one. For here,
as in that much older tale, the protagonist gets no response, and that bothers
him. And then upsets him. And then makes him angry. And then makes him furious. And as Plankton goes through
all those feelings about Mister Mussel, who he says is “just RUDE,” Mister
Mussel simply sits there doing nothing. He does nothing when Plankton gets
louder. Nothing when Plankton slows down the words of his greeting. Nothing
when Plankton goes “Grrrrrr” or “Hmmmph.” Nothing when Plankton taps his
foot…or whatever appendage that is. Nothing when Plankton gets down on his
knees…or whatever body parts those are…and begs
Mister Mussel to say something. But then, finally, finally, finally, Mister Mussel responds to
Plankton, gradually, gradually, gradually
opening his shell as Plankton drifts closer and closer and closer. Kids will immediately know where this is going to end up,
or where Plankton is going to end up, and yup, sure enough, “SNAP!” And then, at the very end, Mister Mussel does have something to say – for which Plankton,
pushing the closed shell open, is suitably grateful. The absurdity here is on a
level wholly different from that of The
Legend of Rock Paper Scissors, but in its own less-violent,
much-less-elaborately-drawn way, Plankton
Is Pushy is just as much fun. However, Plankton is darned lucky not to have
encountered Rock, Paper or Scissors during their heroic quests.

Kids in the 4-8 age range
have a great deal to learn and balance, including the wish to explore and the
simultaneous wish to stay with what is familiar. This desire lies at the core
of North, South, East, West, a
previously unpublished story by Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952) brought
charmingly to life by Greg Pizzoli with illustrations that superimpose simple
shapes like layers of tissue paper and in so doing produce lovely color
changes: a bird’s light-blue wings, for instance, when seen over her red body,
turn a darker shade that blends both hues. The story, as befits a tale for this
age range and as is typical of Brown’s work, is at its core very simple and
charmingly poetic. A mother bird gets her nestling ready to fly away to a home
of her own by teaching her “to fly above and below the storms,/ and to glide on
the strength of the wind.” But where shall the young bird go? She wonders aloud,
“When I fly away, which is best?/ North, South, East, or West?” This is left
for her to discover on her own, just as young readers must eventually discover
it for themselves. And so the little bird flies “to the North,/ to a land of
ice and snow,” but finds it too cold. Then she flies to the South, but “it was
too hot there to build a nest,” so she rests a bit and flies to the West – only
to find herself thinking that for all the interesting things she has seen in
the North, South and West, “the East was home.” And so she flies back “to where
the land was soft and green with rain,/ and the sycamore trees grew tall,” and
that is where she remains to grow bigger and have a family of her own. And of
course, when her nestlings come out
of their eggs, they ask exactly the same question that the bird asked at the
beginning of the book – which way is best to fly? Now the bird and her mate
(who has one of his wings wrapped delicately around her) smile at the three
little ones asking the question; and the very last page of the book, which has
no words at all, shows the small birds flying off in three different directions
– to discover their own “best” place or, perhaps, to return, as their mother
did, to the place that will always be home. North,
South, East, West has a deeply reassuring message that is beautifully
conveyed by Brown’s text, and Pizzoli’s art fits so well with the words that it
is almost as if the previously untold story was waiting for these illustrations
to come into being so its message could be properly conveyed.

Mac Barnett’s Places to Be has some of the same
simplicity of style as books like Brown’s, and Renata Liwska’s illustrations
fit it very well (if not quite as seamlessly as Pizzoli’s fit North, South, East, West). But Places to Be is a different sort of
book, about an older and younger sibling – bear cubs, in this case – who
together explore both their neighborhood and their emotions. Together they find
“places to be tall” (the smaller one stands on the larger one’s head to reach a
ball stuck in a tree), “places to be loud” (they yell as the bike they are on
careens down a hill), “places to be mad” (they face opposite ways on a bench
after a quarrel), “places to be brave” (a high diving board), “places to be
picky” (at the table with nothing on their plates but vegetables), and so on.
What makes Barnett’s book special is that it does not sugarcoat childhood or
the bears’ relationship. The bigger bear’s place “to be bored” is in a hospital
bed while his broken leg heals; there is a place “to be sullen” (a good
vocabulary word, explained by the two bears being unable to buy ice cream
because the stand that sells it is closed); and there is a place “to be
jubilant” (another good vocabulary word, associated with a fireworks display). The
interaction of the two bear siblings seems completely natural and unforced,
certainly with the inevitable ups and downs that all brothers and sisters face,
but with an underlying current of real love. This is shown through a kind of
“framing story” in which, near the book’s start, the bigger bear’s skateboard
breaks, putting him in a place that is “blue and purple” – and at the end, the
two bears work together to make a new skateboard that the bigger bear rides on
the final page as the smaller one rides a bike. The warmth of the bears’
relationship does not prevent all problems or solve all difficulties – a very
good lesson for kids in the target age range – but it persists despite the
inevitable bumps in the emotional road, and that is what really matters. Places to Be would be an especially good
read-aloud book for a child, whether younger or older, who is trying to cope
with the irritations and hassles of a brother or sister. The book shows that
the ultimate place to be is together – a worthy lesson for kids of any age.

This book, Neil Gaiman’s
first major solo novel, has been around since 2001, and was released in its
expanded “author’s cut” version on a limited basis in 2003 and then for the
mass market in 2011. It is certainly fair to ask why the book is coming around
again, and what is left to say about it.

Well, the “why” is easy
enough to explain: this is a TV tie-in edition for a series based on the book.
(Gaiman is also reputed to be working on American
Gods 2, but that is not relevant to this reissue.)The “what to say” is less evident. Gaiman was
amazingly accurate when he said that this was the kind of book that people
would either love or hate. Long after its initial publication, it is still a
book that inspires strong emotions, one way or the other. The literary
community itself adored and presumably still adores it: the book won multiple
awards in multiple genres, which if nothing else provide testimony to the
difficulty of placing it in any specific category. And American Gods sold gobs and gobs of copies, first in its original
incarnation and then in its subsequent, 12,000-word-longer one (the one that is
here reissued).

But there are nagging
problems with the book that make it understandable if a minority of readers,
perhaps a sizable minority, finds it exceedingly off-putting. Its underlying
premise is nothing new: gods are only as powerful as people’s belief in them.
(When you stop to think about it, that is not even a premise – it is a
description of how religion works.) And it is certainly possible to posit that
old gods, Norse and Native American and so on, might resent the coming of new
gods (of wealth, technology and such) that have taken over all those worshippers.
It is even possible to imagine that the old gods might want to engineer a war
against the new gods with the aim of ousting or destroying them – although the
method of doing so is a bit obscure, since what the old gods need is not
victory in battle but a vast increase in people’s belief in them.

However, in American Gods the promised battle royal
never happens: the climax of the book is that Shadow, the central Everyman
character, prevents it by the simple expedient of explaining that the old gods
have been pulling everyone’s strings in order to foment hostilities. But these
are, you know, gods, whether old or
new, and their inability to figure out what has been going on without some help
from the rather dim Shadow strains credulity even in a fantasy novel (which is
one thing that American Gods is).

Shadow is rather weak and
rather dull for a central character – for example, it takes him an
unconscionably long time to figure out that Mr. Wednesday is the American incarnation
of Odin (for whom the weekday Wednesday is named). But in a picaresque novel
(another thing that American Gods
is), an overly naïve central character who makes discoveries along with
readers, or even after readers have figured things out, is perfectly
acceptable. Less clear are some of Gaiman’s foundational premises, such as the
whole nation-based incarnation thing: there are different versions of gods in
different places, but given the fact that nations are themselves artificial
constructs whose borders can and do change, it is hard to justify the idea that
the power of a particular god-incarnation rests with the belief of humans who
happen to inhabit what happens to be a nation whose boundaries happen to be
what they are at any given time. At the very least, this would seem to mean
that gods fade in and out as nations’ boundaries contract or expand (actually,
that is an intriguing notion, but not one that appears in American Gods).

And yet for all its
structural flaws, and some narrative ones as well, American Gods is a powerful, involving, intricate novel that stands
up very well in its episodic way. It is deliberately
episodic, filled with subplots and cutaways and explanatory sections and other
techniques that will be as maddening to some readers as they will be intriguing
to others. It is a book packed with clever names, such as Mr. Nancy for Anansi
the spider god, Low Key Lyesmith for the Norse trickster Loki, Whiskey Jack for
the much-less-known trickster Wisakedjak (from Algonquian mythology), Mr.
Jaquel for the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis, and so on; again, though,
some readers will find the whole naming thing overdone, overused or just
over-the-top. And not everyone will enjoy the occasional bit of subtle
sociopolitical commentary in American
Gods, such as the creation of the Intangibles as modern gods of the stock
market – personifying the famous notion of an “invisible hand” and wanting to
avoid direct confrontation with the old gods because they think market forces
will take care of any dispute. Certainly the book has its over-obvious
elements, such as the idyllic town of Lakeside that anyone familiar with horror
stories or films will realize must hold a gruesome secret. But it also has
considerable subtlety, including Shadow’s use of coin tricks and his eventual
departure without waiting to see how his last such trick turns out.

Ultimately, American Gods is a mishmash – a
deliberate one – with elements of fantasy, horror, mystery, science fiction and
more. Readers looking for consistency of tone, voice or plot will not find it
here; whether this is deemed a strength or a weakness will depend on each individual
who picks up American Gods. And that,
in the final analysis, is what is still (or again) worth saying about Gaiman’s
book. It is admiration-provoking, anger-provoking, and, more important than
either of those, thought-provoking. The new edition offers readers familiar
with it an excellent chance to reacquaint themselves with what they like or
hate about it, while giving those who do not yet know the book a perfect excuse
to become involved in disputes about it that have already stretched through the
better part of two decades.

Tin Can Titans: The Heroic Men
and Ships of World War II’s Most Decorated Navy Destroyer Squadron. By John
Wukovits. Da Capo. $28.

Followers of World War II
stories can, it seems, never get enough of them, and authors such as John
Wukovits are there to continue supplying them before the war’s survivors are
gone forever. It is hard to feel anything less than admiration for the fighters
whose stories are chronicled in books such as Tin Can Titans and Wukovits’ previous foray into writing about
destroyers of the era, Hell from the
Heavens. And yet these books will likely produce a sense of weariness in
all readers but those most committed to the subject matter, because while the
individual stories of ships, crews and battles differ, the basic underlying
narrative – of turmoil, trouble, and eventual triumph – remains essentially the
same in book after book.

This time the focus is on Destroyer
Squadron 21 (DesRon 21), which Wukovits follows from mid-1942 to its remaining
ships’ eventual honor of leading the United States Fleet into Tokyo Bay to accept
Japan’s surrender in August 1945. In many ways, the earlier sections of the
book, which is in three parts, will be the most interesting for war buffs,
since Wukovits here details the origins of the destroyers in the squadron, the
way the squadron itself was organized, and how matters fared when DesRon 21
faced its initial long and bloody campaign at Guadalcanal. One thing readers
will learn here – and it may be genuinely new to anyone not already steeped in
knowledge of World War II – is that destroyers were the jacks-of-all-trades of
the U.S. Navy in the war’s early days, simply because the U.S. economy had not
fully recovered from the Great Depression and was not yet capable of the level
of warship construction that would eventually turn the tide (so to speak) in
the Pacific. Indeed, there is an ongoing dispute as to whether World War II was
an economic necessity, albeit a terribly grim one, for reviving a moribund
economy, or whether the policies instituted by President Roosevelt and Congress
through the 1930s were finally beginning to have a salutary effect by the early
1940s. Such issues are absent from Tin
Can Titans, however, and are of no apparent interest to Wukovits or the
readers he seeks. But they are worth keeping in mind as the author explains the
necessity of destroyers doing such a long list of duties: fighting enemy surface
vessels, hunting submarines, escorting larger warships and supply ships, doing
anti-aircraft duty, and more. In a very real sense, destroyers were the
workhorses of the war, especially in the early days of U.S. involvement in it.
Their crucial role explains why they and not a larger and more elegant ship
were chosen to enter Tokyo Bay at the war’s end.

In the book’s third part,
Wukovits follows DesRon 21 through the latter part of the Pacific war, discussing
the well-known island-hopping concept that forced the Japanese back from island
after island and eventually to Okinawa. Wukovits details the elements of the
strategy and the campaigns within it, emphasizing the loss of ships as well as
crew members – often from mines and kamikaze attacks. And then, at the book’s
end, Wukovits brings the three surviving destroyers to Tokyo Bay – and, in an
epilogue, summarizes the squadron’s accomplishments and tells briefly of the postwar
lives of a few of the many officers and crew members of the ships. The approach
is wholly conventional throughout the book, mixing strategic information with
personal stories and eventually (in two appendices) detailing the squadron’s
awards and showing where each vessel was at the war’s conclusion. There are the
usual photos, some of ships and some of crew members, and the book as a whole
draws on the usual mixture of first-person stories and contemporary coverage of
DesRon 21’s activities. The result is a well-researched, well-paced book that
will certainly have considerable meaning for the families of the crews that
served in DesRon 21, and that will please readers who simply cannot get enough
of World War II minutiae. However, Wukovits makes no attempt whatsoever to turn
this book into anything more than yet another untold (or previously imperfectly
told) tale of war heroism. The book is strictly for people who are already
enamored – that is not too strong a word – of the exploits of fighters in a war
three-quarters of a century ago that remains, for many, a shining example of pure
and just combat whose every nook and cranny deserves full exploration and
consummate praise.

Three little-known wartime violin-and-piano
sonatas from two different wars show just how effectively composers can
communicate with a paucity of instruments. Franz Reizenstein (1911-1968) wrote
his Sonata in G-sharp in 1945. There
is a reason that the sonata is not designated as being in G-sharp major or
G-sharp minor: it moves restlessly between the major and minor keys, which the
piano establishes at the outset. The uncertainty is a formative element of the
work’s first movement. The second movement is a bouncy Scherzo with some
obeisance to Shostakovich. The third and last is complex, abrupt and
fast-changing, and eventually leads to a juxtaposition of B natural and B-sharp
that reinforces the work’s ambiguous tonality. The underlying feeling of being
deeply unsettled by a world at war comes through far more clearly than the
work’s tonality does. Louisa Stonehill and Nicholas Burns, who call themselves
the Steinberg Duo, play the work sure-handedly and with empathetic
understanding. They do an equally fine job with the sonata by Geoffrey Bush
(1920-1998), who wrote this piece in the same year as Reizenstein’s in G-sharp,
1945. This is the world première
recording of the single-movement work, whose thoroughgoing chromatic
uncertainty somewhat parallels that of Reizenstein: Bush never allows any key
to establish and maintain itself for more than a few measures. The melodies of
the work are quite lovely and perhaps reflective of Bush’s hopes for a better
postwar world (he was an avowed pacifist); but the setting within which those
melodies are heard is that of a world that is at best uncertain of where it
stands and where life is going. The second sonata by John Ireland (1879-1962)
dates to the previous world war and was first heard in 1917, at which time it
caused such a sensation that the first printed edition sold out even before
publication. It is an attractive three-movement work whose instant popularity,
from the standpoint of a century later, is a bit hard to comprehend. Certainly,
though, it has effectively expressed emotional ups and downs: there is clear
anguish in parts, balanced by warm lyricism that elicits pity for the horrors
of the conflict. The central second movement is the most interesting, evoking
the feeling of a death march but containing a beautiful, optimism-filled tune
in the center that surely reflected the initial audience’s hopes for the
future. The Lyrita recording is technically fine but has bizarre errors in the
dates of both Bush and Ireland (the enclosed booklet is correct).

Many of the works of
Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959)
were also influenced by war, but that is not the focus of the new Navona CD on
which cellist Meredith Blecha-Wells and pianist Sun Min Kim offer five of his
suites of short pieces plus a very brief Ariette.
Although one of the four Nocturnes
lasts six minutes and another almost four, nothing else on the CD reaches three
minutes in length: this is Martinů
as miniaturist. The style of the works is generally conservative, but the
frequent overlay of Czech folk music gives the works a distinctive touch that
is typical of Martinů. The
brightness of the Rossini variations contrasts nicely with the flowing, lyrical
line of the Ariette. The Arabesques are generally upbeat and
pleasant and not very consequential. Suite
Miniature, in seven movements, has the delicacy and some of the flippancy
of a piece for or about children, although it is neither. The Nocturnes are somewhat more expansive
and the only works here with a modicum of depth of feeling, although even here the
overall impression is mostly one of gentle play and contemplative relaxation.
The Variations on a Slovakian Theme
show Martinů’s skill in
variation form even better than do those on Rossini’s theme, and they allow the
cello a kind of broad folkloric expressiveness that fits the material very well
and that Blecha-Wells carries off with considerable skill. The interplay
between cellist and pianist and their fine ensemble work are major attractions
of this disc of mostly lightweight music.

The three Karl Höller works on a new MSR Classics
release focus neither on violin nor on cello, although both are present. The
dominant sound here is that of the organ, which is scarcely an instrument
usually associated with chamber music. Barbara Harbach, a very fine organist as
well as a skilled composer in her own right, clearly finds the music of Höller (1907-1987) congenial. The
tonal language here is primarily that of the late Romantic era, but it is blended, generally rather seamlessly, with
the neoclassicism of Paul Hindemith and some of the approaches to organ music
favored by Max Reger. Indeed, two of the works on this disc have neo-Baroque
sensibilities despite their more-modern harmonic structure. Triptychon is a three-movement solo
organ work “on the Easter sequence ‘Victimae paschali laudes,’” and Improvisation is a five-movement piece
“on the spiritual folksong ‘Schönster Herr Jesus.’” The religious underpinning
of both these works ties to the traditional centrality of the church in organ
music, yet Höller’s use of a
folksong as the basis for Improvisation
pulls the instrument our of a strictly ecclesiastical setting and into the
wider world. Unlike Martinů, Höller does not seem to take the folk
elements of his underlying material deeply to heart, at least in this work, but
he writes just as effectively for cello and organ as Martinů does for cello and piano – and in
fact Höller’s integration of
the stringed and wind instruments is so well done that listeners may wonder why
the combination is so rare. As for Triptychon,
it is a more conventional piece in its sacred theme and in Höller’s handling of the material, and
at nearly half an hour it is somewhat overly expansive, without the tight
integration of form that, for example, Widor and Vierne brought to their organ
symphonies. Harbach certainly plays the piece very well, though. As for the
somewhat slighter Fantasie, here the
balance of violin and organ is attractive – and in some ways more immediately
appealing than that of the lower, more-resonant cello with the organ in Improvisation. Again, though, the
single-movement Fantasie uses the two
instruments in such interesting ways that listeners may wish for further
examples of this type of strings-and-organ combination, which in skilled hands
like Höller’s offers a very
intriguing mixture of sounds.

There is nothing unusual in
the instrumental combination on a new Navona release featuring the Altius
Quartet – but the quartet itself is determined, absolutely determined, to make
the recording as unusual as possible. Thus, while the performers do play one of
Haydn’s wonderful, balanced, carefully structured quartets (Op. 74, No. 1),
they apparently think it would be beneath them to perform the piece as Haydn
intended. Oh, no – that would not have sufficient “contemporary chic.” So after
the first movement of the quartet, the players perform two other, entirely
unrelated works; then they give the quartet’s second movement; then another
unrelated piece; then the third movement; then two more pieces having nothing
to do with Haydn; and then the finale – followed by something else. The whole
approach is reminiscent of the classic Monty Python line, “And now for
something completely different” – an indication of a deliberate non sequitur. And that does indeed seem
to be what the Altius Quartet here pursues. Among the pieces that interrupt
Haydn is William Bolcom’s Three Ghost
Rags, given here in the order 2-1-3 (for no apparent reason): this work
itself suffers from being broken up into component parts. And then there is
something called Take It that meshes
Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” with Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” And a medley of
Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and “Kashmir.” And Ben E. King’s “Stand by
Me.” And, at the CD’s very end, there is “Take on Me” by a-ha (sic). Certainly the disc is intended to
be playful and with-it and all that, and certainly there are playful elements
both in Haydn’s quartet (1793) and Bolcom’s music (1970). And in everything
else here, for that matter. But a juxtaposition of, say, the Haydn (played as a
whole) with the Bolcom (played in the order the composer intended) would have
made for quite a fine contrast without the necessity of breaking the pieces up
into their component parts and tossing in little bits of this and that as well.
The Altius Quartet – which, by the way, plays all the music quite well – seems
to be trying too hard to be cool and contemporary and cognizant of the
extremely short attention span of many listeners today. The longest track on
the CD runs less than seven minutes, while the full Haydn quartet would require
that people pay attention for (horrors!) 23 minutes. This CD turns out to be
testimony to the superficiality of far too much music and far too many
listeners in our time.

There is contemporary flair
as well on a new MSR Classics CD that is also trying perhaps a bit too hard to
be, well, contemporary. It features the very fine trumpeter Thomas Pfotenhauer
in six world première
recordings of six pieces by six female composers. It is the combined emphasis
on all-new material and all-female material that makes this into something of a
“cause” recording – which is actually a shame, since the works here all contain
elements of considerable interest independent of their provenance. That simply
means they are worthy when judged as
music, not as music from a specified era or by someone of a specified
gender – that kind of musical “identity politics” is really quite unnecessary
here. Jazz Professor Glasses for solo trumpet and flugelhorn (2008)
by Anne Guzzo (born 1968) is especially interesting, its three movements
exploring some of the outer reaches of both instruments to good effect – and
with a strong flavoring of Chinese influence in the first movement and of jazz
in the finale. All the other works pair Pfotenhauer with pianist Vincent Fuh,
who provides very able backup and accompaniment. The longest piece is Framed (2009) by Cecilia McDowell (born
1951), an interesting seven-movement Pictures
at an Exhibition derivative intended to capture the artistic styles of Auguste
Renoir, James McNeill Whistler, Alberto Giacometti, Hendrick Avercamp, Andy
Warhol, Simon Marmion, and Alexander Rodchenko. Whether it does so or not will
depend on each listener’s response and on how well an individual knows the
painters – but whether or not the musical portraits are wholly successful, they
certainly do show the wide range of colors and emotions of which the trumpet is
capable. Two nicely compressed three-movement works here effectively contrast
the trumpet’s lyrical capabilities with its martial side: Concertino (1989) by Ida Gotkovsky (born 1933) and Sonata (2002) by Elaine Fine (born
1959). There is also the disc’s three-movement title work by Faye-Ellen
Silverman (born 1947), Stories for Our
Time (2007), and this piece takes trumpet style further than the others do,
through greater dissonance, a wider variety of performance techniques, and
stronger contrast among the movements. Silverman’s work follows and stands in
strong contrast to the lovely single movement called Look Little Low Heavens (1992) by Hilary Tann (born 1947). Inspired
by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Spring,
Tann’s work is gentle, serene and lyrical except for a central dramatic
section. Tann, interestingly, is another composer who, like Guzzo, has drawn
inspiration from the Orient, although in Tann’s case from Japan rather than
China.

Neither Guzzo nor Tann has,
however, absorbed the influence of Chinese music in the way than Zhen Chen has
– as is abundantly clear from a new Navona CD. The 10 works here sound as if
they are drawn from Chinese folk music, but in actuality they are not –
instead, Chen has studied and analyzed the sounds of the music and brought it
into forms that allow some of the material to be played on the piano. The other
instruments here are the lute-like pipa and bowed erhu. Two pieces, Jade and Dance Floor Banter, are for piano and pipa; two, Regret and Longing, are for piano and erhu; two, Plum Blossom Chant and Lament,
are for piano and voice; two, Springfield
and Turpan Tango, are for piano, pipa
and erhu; one, Stroll by the Lake, is
for piano, pipa and voice; and the final work on the disc, Recollection, is for solo piano. The combinations show clearly that
Chen has carefully thought through the ways in which these instruments
(including the voice, which is used here primarily as an instrument, whether
speaking words or singing a vocalise) can interweave with and complement each
other. To ears more accustomed to Western music, the works here have a sameness
of sound that makes them seem longer than in fact they are: the CD runs just 42
minutes but seems to stretch out much farther. As background music or music
designed to enhance meditation or contemplation, the works come across well;
but except for Turpan Tango and Dance Floor Banter, which are more
upbeat than the other pieces and have some Western-style dance rhythms at their
core, there is little to distinguish the pieces here except for their titles.
As a showcase for the ways in which Oriental and Occidental musical thinking
can be blended and hybridized, Chen’s creations are interesting. But the
hybridization wears thin rather quickly and seems more appropriate for
contemplative mood-setting than for any focus on the music as music.

Intended as they are for
ages from birth through three or four, board books would seem to offer little
room for creativity in writing, illustration and design. In fact, however, the
opposite is the case: the short, restricted form of these books frequently
inspires authors and illustrators to produce very pleasant and highly creative
stories and ways of communicating information. Two new offerings from
Pomegranate Kids are particularly intriguing for their educational value. Zoe
Burke’s Lines and Triangles and Squares,
Oh My! is exceptional. Starting with straight, colored lines and using the
services of a cartoon cat named Bluebell, Burke and illustrator Carey Hall show
young children how a triangle is made and what sorts of things are
triangle-shaped (mountains, Bluebell’s hat and ears, and so on). Then, starting
with four straight lines, Burke and Hall create a square and show all the
square-shaped things around Bluebell. And then they spin the square to make a
diamond – using the same four lines in the same four colors, so kids can easily
see what is going on – and show diamond-shaped objects. And then they stretch the
diamond – the visualization here, using arrows, is quite clear and easy to
follow – and now have a rectangle, which they can once again show in a number
of places that kids will be able to identify (a table, a door, a bed, etc.).
Finally, Bluebell is seen playing with a wiggly line that is smoothed and tied
to itself to form a circle – and, yet again, there are plenty of circles to be
found in the book’s illustrations. This is a lot of learning to pack into
board-book format, and the final two pages – in which Bluebell appears as a
train engineer in a scene containing all the shapes explained in the book –
make an excellent conclusion. Both the concept and the execution here are well
beyond what parents would likely expect from a board book – an impressive
achievement.

Almost as intriguing is Claire Winteringham’s Alphabet Parade,
which has no story at all: it simply shows attractive watercolor illustrations
of various animals and objects beginning with each letter of the alphabet. The
fun here is in the quality of the pictures, the unusual choices of some items
to illustrate the letters, and the attractive juxtapositions on some pages. The
letter E, for instance, includes elephants and egg – no surprise there – but
the egg is balanced right on the end of one elephant’s trunk, and that makes
the illustration quite interesting. Furthermore, this letter’s page also
mentions egret and eucalyptus tree, and neither that bird nor that plant is
commonly found in alphabet books (and the egret is actually perched in the
tree). This is Winteringham’s approach throughout the book. The letter I has
only two entries, iguana and insects, but there are 11 different insects shown,
from beetles to butterflies. The letter N includes not only a nest but also the
baby birds in it, referred to as nestlings – and the specific bird species is
nuthatch (there is a newt in the picture, too). The letter D has a dinosaur
following a duck past date palms and daisies as a dragonfly soars overhead. The
letter R has the unusual combination of rabbits, rhinoceros and rocket. And the
letter O is an ocean scene (“ocean” is one of the words) in which a very large
octopus has one tentacle gently wrapped around an owl and two others cradling
oranges. Colorful and clever, Claire
Winteringham’s Alphabet Parade makes a fine introduction to the letters of
the alphabet, the typical sturdy board-book format making it particularly easy
for little hands to hold.

Other board books, although
quite pleasant, are considerably more conventional in telling simple stories
and illustrating them pleasantly but not in any exceptional way. Two by
Sebastien Braun, I Love My Daddy and I Love My Mommy, fit this description.
Each two-page spread of the “daddy” book shows a big brown bear and his small
cub together as the cub tells, in just a few words, something that the two of
them do: “My daddy wakens me.” “My daddy washes me.” “My daddy chases me.” The
bears play hide-and-seek in the forest, run about in a meadow, sit looking out
at a mountain vista, play a tickling game, cuddle, and more – and the final
page, “I love my daddy,” simply shows the cub curled up in the sleeping big
bear’s arms, about to fall asleep himself. I
Love My Mommy follows a somewhat different path: here, the basic narrative
is similar, but every two-page shows a different animal-mom-and-child scene. “My
mommy watches me while I play” features rabbits; “my mommy takes me swimming”
has river otters; “my mommy helps me to climb” shows squirrels; “my mommy works
really hard” uses beavers; “my mommy cuddles me” features foxes; and the final
“I love my mommy” shows a mother bird with two little ones, one tucked within
each wing. Braun’s books are simple, straightforward, warmhearted and designed
for reading aloud to children who are too young to read themselves. They are sweet
and cozy, even a little overdone in their determined delicacy – fine for the
very youngest infants, but likely of less interest as babies start becoming
interested in reading on their own and are ready to absorb the more-complicated
concepts found in Claire Winteringham’s
Alphabet Parade and Lines and
Triangles and Squares, Oh My!